Facebook Plan To Take Down Snapchat Rival

Snap is the parent company of the popular Snapchat social media platform and on Thursday it filed for an initial public offering (IPO).

What does that mean? Well, among other things, Snapchat will be publicly traded on the NYSE via the ticker SNAP and the company hopes to raise three billion dollars with its initial public offering. Snapchat has over 160 million daily active users but its growth seem to be slowing lately, while last year was pretty far from good revenue wise.

However, Snapchat is basically Facebook’s only rival and arguably a big threat in the future for the company.

Actually, Mark Zuckerberg, who is the founder and CEO of Facebook made a three billion dollars offer for Snapchat 4 years ago in 2013, but the takeover was rebuffed.

That did not stop Facebook to copy a number of Snapchat features from its standalone application for using them in Facebook’s own apps. Very recently, Facebook introduced what can be described as a clone of Snapchat into Instagram.

On Wednesday, Facebook discussed its quarterly earnings and during the conference, a series of comments were made about Instagram. Even if Snapchat wasn’t mentioned at all during the call, Mark Zuckerberg described his strategy for long-term Instagram growth, including the fact that Facebook created a quasi identical product with Snapchat’s Stories which is already more popular than Snapchat’s entire application:

Over the next five years, we’re going to keep building ecosystems around our apps that a lot of people are already using. Growth and engagement on Instagram have been strong. We announced in December that Instagram now has over 600 million monthly actives and recently passed 400 million daily actives. Instagram Storiesreached 150 million daily actives just five months after the launch, and we’ve added new features like Boomerang and Live into Stories and I’m excited to see that continue to grow.

said Mark Zuckerberg. Instagram is arguably Snapchat’s biggest threat and that’s why Facebook has been on a tear to try to imitate Snapchat on Facebook’s own platforms. Basically, Facebook and Instagram can and probably will copy any new feature from Snapchat thus allowing hundreds of millions of usees which certainly do not have a Snapchat account to try the respective features in Facebook’s universe first.

For example, Instagram has over 600 million users and it launched Stories last August as a section of its app which is arguably a perfect copy of Snapchat’s own Stories section.